


Piano

by KingOfTheCliche



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, Smart Dean, Smart Dean Winchester, lots of implied stuff going on in this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-26
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-25 21:58:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3826486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KingOfTheCliche/pseuds/KingOfTheCliche
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"One time, when Castiel had flown in and back out in that way he used to do, you couldn’t get the sound of his wings out of your head."<br/>Sam and Dean are solving a case. There's a piano. Dean is a genius in disguise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Piano

**Author's Note:**

> I had a lot of songs in my head today, but this one keeps resurfacing: Divenire

You haven’t thought about a piano in a long while. You haven’t seen one for far longer. The first time you see the dusty pianoforte in the old house you barely pay attention to it. There are more pressing matters at hand. Somewhere in this house a sad, unstable spirit is throwing out strings of angry energy so strong the hair on the back of your neck crackles with it. Sam is all professionalism, thinking quickly, but not too deeply. You, on the other hand, can’t help but be shaken by this particular spirit.

It used to be an old man, this ghost. They know for a fact that he is the one behind the mysterious deaths among the student body in the nearby elementary school. One of the victims was no more than seven years old. He didn’t even have the chance to grow his real teeth.

Together you stalk up the stairs. Two grown men going up a disused staircase should be making a lot of noise, but not you. You two know how to be quiet, how to keep the attention averted from yourself, unless you want it directed in your direction. On the landing, Sam points left and you nod and go right. Once upon a time you would not have split up, but there is little that scares you nowadays and the things that do you carry within yourself.

You walk down the big corridor, alongside the high windows. Everything in this place breathes opulence. Chandeliers, paintings, a female bust. They all sit there collecting dust since God knows how long. It doesn’t matter to you. You don’t care about this type of stuff. It’s nice, sure, but it makes you feel constricted in a way that even a cheap motel room never could. You prefer the Men of Letters bunker, with its solid architecture and thick walls that could keep out any and all evil. You walk past a big door and push it open with your foot, but there is nothing inside except a big, dusty piano. After making sure that’s all there is in the room, you walk out and continue your search for the ghost.

When you hear Sam calling your name with that particular tone of stress, you don’t even have to think about what to do next. You grab your shotgun and storm back to where you left your brother. He’s being slammed into the wall when you enter the room.

Aim. Shoot. Duck.

When you get up, the ghost has vanished, but you know that it won’t be for long.

‘We have to hurry’, Sam manages to say after he finds his footing again.

‘You don’t say’, you reply, giving him a once over to assure yourself that there was no serious damage done.

‘He’s going after Murphy next, we have to keep him busy here until daylight.’

You don’t like the idea. You already told Sam you don’t like the idea. You want to get to the bastard’s bones as soon as you can and salt and burn them before he can do anything next. But –

‘We can’t let you near a graveyard with that thing, Dean. You know that.’ Sam seemed to have guessed his thoughts. They really did spend an unhealthy amount of time together.

‘I know’, you grumble. And you do know, but that doesn’t make it any easier. The damn Mark started itching anytime he got close to the town’s churchyard. He didn’t know why and neither did Sam, but after you dropped your lighter for the third time Sam pulled you off the sacred ground and back into the car. Better safe than sorry, he’d said, but you can’t decide who they’re keeping safe now.

‘If we don’t do anything, he’ll go after Murphy anyway and then we’re just wasting our time’, you say, trying to stay calm, but not doing a very good job.

Sam seemed to chew his tongue for a moment before saying: ‘Maybe I should go salt and burn and you stay here and keep him busy.’

You stare at Sam for a second. ‘Keep him busy?’ you repeat. What you want to say is: _How am I supposed to do that_? Instead you add: ‘Okay. But hurry.’

Sam hesitates again, but then he nods and grabs his own gun from the ground. Together you walk down the stairs, not caring about how much noise you make this time. When Sam pushes the door open, he fixes you with a straight look. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. Just keep him busy until I’ve burned his bones. It’ll take an hour, tops.’

You look at the horizon, where everything is black. It’s much more than an hour to sunrise.

When Sam has left, you go back into the house. You can’t help but teasingly sing: ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are.’

You go back to where Sam found the ghost the first time and now you realize it was a bedroom. According to the files you read, this is where the old man killed himself. The reasons are still unclear, but Sam thinks it has something to do with all the parents pulling their kids out of his music class. He taught private piano lessons. Until he didn’t.

The bed looks comfy enough and you take a run-up and jump on it, making dust shoot up into the room. Your involuntary laughter seems to do the trick, because shortly after you feel your lungs go cold in your chest. When you turn around – still jumping up and down the old bed – you see an old man in a purple vest look at you with pure fury on his face.

You see his fingers moving before he flicks them and manage to brace for the impact of your back colliding with the wall. It hurts, but you’ve had worse.

‘What? Don’t you like it when a hot guy like me makes the springs creak?’ you manage to croak out. ‘An old fag like you, I’d think not.’ In the back of your mind you can hear Sam’s voice growling about crossing the line, but if black people can use the n-word, then surely you are allowed to say fag whenever you damn well liked it.

 The spirit screams. Your arms are pinned by your side, so you can’t protect your ears. The sound goes louder and louder, until you decide to scream along, hoping that the sounds will somehow cancel each other out.

It doesn’t work.

*

When you wake up, you’re lying slumped on the bed, with your feet on the pillows and your head buried in the mess of sheets you’d been jumping on. One look at your clock tells you that you’ve been out for less than five minutes.

The ghost was gone though.

You curse softly and scramble to get up. ‘Hey!’ you yell at the top of your lungs. ‘Come back here!’

There’s no reaction.

With a heart that starts beating a tad too loudly, you run down the stairs, hoping your noise will somehow draw the spirit to you. Your thoughts briefly flitter to Murphy, the last kid who took this man’s piano lessons, a chubby boy with freckles and a lisp.

‘Damn.’

You go back upstairs and start searching the rooms again. You have to get the ghost back to you, so Sam will have enough time to salt and burn and Murphy can get a full night’s sleep without waking up face down in the bath.

The second time you pass the room with the piano, an idea starts forming in your head.

It’s been such a long time, but it might just work…

*

When you were five, not long after your mother passed and your father dropped you off at Pastor Jim’s, only to return a month later, you had a short obsession with the church organ. The keys were huge, much too big for a child that small to be able to press them, even when using your fists, but you loved watching Sister Amanda play it. She had big hands and played the organ almost effortlessly and she succeeded in enchanting you beyond anything you’d known before. Sometimes she let you sit on her lap and follow her hands with yours, so you could pretend you were the one playing.

Dad came back and put you and Sammy in the backseat of the Impala, where you would stay for a while. It wasn’t until you turned seven that a friendly neighbour who had a piano in his apartment let you touch some keys again. Mr Ricks listened with interest to the haphazard sounds you produced and decided there and then that you had an enormous amount of talent and that he would teach you. He taught you for almost a year, until your father found out and subsequently packed everything and hit the road with you and your toddler brother.

At your next stop you had to actively look for a piano to play, because you’d acquired the taste and you didn’t want to get out of practice. You found one in school and played on that one for a bit, until you had to move again.

That was the pattern that emerged. You moved, you looked for a piano, you played it whenever you had time to spare. You moved again. You found another piano. You tried to get used to this one. You moved.

One of the last times you played was a few weeks before Sam left for Stanford. You barely remembered how you stumbled on the old, out of tune thing that could barely call itself a piano, but there it was, against the far wall in a bar that was on the brink of bankruptcy. You spent the entire night trying your best to tune it, with your dad observing you over his drink, but at long last you managed to get some clear sounds of it and continued to play it till closing time. You made a few bucks that night, but not as much as you would have hustling and maybe that’s why your father said to you: ‘We always give Sam all the credit, but you might actually keep up with him if you’d try a little harder.’ You got the message. Loud and clear. Be smart, Dean, don’t let your own fads obscure what’s truly important. After that, you never played when your father could hear you.

 Having gone to Hell and back, having heard the sound of angel wings, you found it hard to readjust after you resurfaced. Sam was different. There was this weird but powerful warrior looking out for you. Everything seemed sharper outlined than before your time on the rack. One time, when Castiel had flown in and back out in that way he used to do, you couldn’t get the sound of his wings out of your head. You carried it with you for miles and miles, until you had another case in another school to save another kid. You slipped into the music room after everyone cleared out and played for hours on end. The teacher had left sheet music behind and you tried to play that. Although you were shaky at best, the song stayed with you. It reminded you of the flutter of wings you’d so desperately tried to forget. When you were done playing and looked up, Sam had been standing by the door, with his arms crossed and an unreadable expression on his face. It was the first time he’d ever heard you play.

It was the last time you ever played.

*

Until now.

Trying desperately to remember the song you last played, you sit down behind the pianoforte and open the lid. The keys are dust free and the pedals are unbroken. A luxury, as far as you’re concerned. You take a deep breath and hit the first note.

You’re bad.

Every few notes, you pull a face because the keys you hit don’t make the sound you want them to, not even remotely. When you’ve finished the song, you try again, not satisfied to let this be the last time you produce music. You can do better than this.

The third time you play the song, it’s improved. Still not perfect though, so you start over, not ready to confess to the almost perverse satisfaction you get out of hitting the keys with everything you have.

Lost in the music, in the sheer amount of options, you don’t notice the presence next to the keys until the spirit looks you right in the eye. He’s going to close the lid and slice your fingers off, that’s your first thought. But you’re wrong. He stands there, looking at you. Then he reaches out and turns an invisible page of some invisible sheet music.

You skipped a few bars, but you straighten your back and keep playing.

The smell of burning cloth reaches your nose before your eyes notice that there is anything wrong. You look at the ghost and see the ends of his sleeves smoulder. Small flames lick his face. His legs start making a simmering sound.

You swallow. By now, your fingers are playing automatically, with more accuracy and less feeling.

Slowly, the flames strengthen. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t move. He just keeps standing next to the piano, watching your hands flutter over the black and white keys. When you chance a look at his face, you see a small tear leak over the wrinkly face, before it disappears completely.

When the last of the ash hits the ground, you stop playing. The silence settles over the room like an opaque mosquito net.

In the end, you get up and go downstairs to wait for Sam.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Two presentations and a test tomorrow. Seemed like the perfect time to write some more. Follow me on scrubyourheart.


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